A hideous monster strikes from the darkness, viciously murdering its victims and leaving behind nothing but badly charred remains. The Enterprise crew arrives at Janus VI, the mining colony terrorized by these attacks, and discovers that the monster feels the same way about the human miners as they do about it; it turns out that the miners have been unknowingly murdering the monster's kindred and what seemed at first to be a series of unprovoked attacks motivated by cruelty and evil was actually part of a desperate campaign of guerilla warfare intended to drive the colonialgenociders from the planet's surface.
By then, the monster, a silicon-based life-form which calls itself a Horta, has been badly wounded by phaser fire from Kirk and Spock and is weak to the point that it is now easy prey for the vengeful miners, who somehow manage to overpower, while armed only with sticks and other makeshift clubs, a supposedly elite and armed-to-the-teeth security detail from the Enterprise which stands between them and bloody (?) revenge.
The miners are stopped from beating (!) the Horta to death when Kirk yells out desperately in rebuttal to the miners's statement that the creature has killed fifty of their own that it was only answering in kind for the murder of thousands of its own kind.

A few carefully chosen words from Kirk and a would-be lynch mob turns remorseful...and their priorities shift from vengeance to avarice

At which point, the miners recognize that it was all a big misunderstanding and form a deal with the Horta in which it, and the thousands like it which will soon hatch from the eggs that the miners had been destroying, will help the miners dig for the rich deposits of pergium, gold, platinum, etc. for which Janus VI is famous and everyone lives happily ever after.

If you take the story at face value, the rapid about face in the collective mood of the miners when the rationale behind the Horta's attacks is revealed to them is too unbelievable to take seriously. These miners aren't real people; they're icons of a human race that is capable of more compassion and objective reasonsing than human beings today..because human beings now would have brushed aside Kirk's and Spock's arguments in defense of the Horta and attempted quite gamely to beat the silicon-based creature to death.

The story is also unbelievable when one considers the deal brokered between the (accidentally) genocidalcolonists and the Horta – the Horta get to help the colonists get rich by plundering Janus VI's natural resources...and in return, the "inoffensive" Horta get to keep living. It's sort of a bizarre allegory of colonialism where the natives cut short their uprising and decide to accept their lot in life to serve their "betters".

And somehow, we're supposed to buy into the fact that this is a good thing.

The colonial overseer of Janus VI gleefully reports the profits reeped in no small part due to the efforts of the now pacified native population – all the Horta ask for in return for their toil is that they get to keep living

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 27, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

The Galileo Seven is an odd episode of
Star Trek: The Original Series. It's basically a disaster movie.
With Spock in the role of the plucky hero who leads everyone to
safety. His turn as leader is hindered by the fact that for some
unfathomable reason, he has lost all of the emotional sensitivity
that he exhibited in the previous episodes. Not only has he lost his
emotional sensitivity, he has turned into a Forrest Gump of emotional
sensitivity, unintentionally alienating everyone around him. It
doesn't help that everyone around him, with the exception of Scotty,
seems to have collectively taken leave of their senses.

For most of The Galileo Seven, we are
presented with Spock making what are basically very sound, rational
decisions given the situation the eponymous seven Enterprise
crewmembers are in, and everyone else, with the exception of Scotty,
who spends most of this episode with his head under the hood of the
stricken shuttlecraftGalileo, objecting to the choices that he
makes, mainly, it seems, out of spite. It's as if being stranded on
Taurus II has resulted in everyone binning themselves into one of two
categories: Persons principally driven by their id or persons
principally driven by their ego...with almost everyone almost
gleefully giving themselves over to their id.

Irrationality abounds in this episode.
Not only that, but it's trumpeted as something to be proud of,
something that makes us human.

Following this strange logic, the
residents of the local asylum would be the ideal exemplars of all
that is human. I would argue the contrary, that what makes us human
is our rationality or at least our capacity for such. In which case
Mr. Spock would appear to be the most human of all the characters in
this episode. How deliciously ironic that someone who constantly
struggles to suppress his humanity turns out to be the most human of
them all. A foreshadowing of Kirk's eulogy at the end of The Wrath of Khan?

Or maybe I'm reading too deeply into an
episode which is, at the end of the day, basically a disaster movie.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 15, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

Kirk complains of a sore back and when
someone starts giving him an unsolicited back rub, he assumes it's
Spock, rather than the scrumptious Yeomen Tonia Barrows, that's
giving him relief from his aches and pains.

Kirk confounds Yeomen
Barrows's handiwork with Spock's

McCoy sees a giant rabbit, gets
"killed" by a medievalknight on horseback and then shows
up, alive and well, arm-in-arm with bunnies of a different sort.

McCoy
in a heaven of sorts after "dying"

Then there's the sub-plot of how a
strange force field emanating from the seemingly idyllic planet that
the Enterprise is orbiting is draining its engines; this sub-plot is
rather abruptly dropped by episode's end and not satisfactorily
concluded.

I'm not saying that Theodore Sturgeon,
the writer responsible for Shore Leave, was on drugs when he put pen
to paper, but it sure would explain a lot.

And am I the only one who caught on to
the fact that every member of the crew that walked on the bridge at
the conclusion of the episode got laid? Knowing Kirk, he definitely
got it on with the simulacrum of Ruth, the girl from his past. McCoy
and Barrows presumably did something to explain the smiles on their
faces. And you can't tell me that the swashbuckling Mr. Sulu didn't
do anything with the simulacra of the cabaret girls he ended up
arm-in-arm with in the final scene on the planet's surface?

As in many of the early Star Trek
episodes, we're treated to the spectacle of Spock using logic to
justify kicking some ass; in this case, he points out that showing
weakness in the face of Romulan aggression will only result in
interstellar war. Thus, to avoid war, the Enterprise crew must
pursue and destroy the Romulan Bird of Prey that has encroached upon
Federation space.

Logic dictates,
captain, that we open up a can of whoop-ass on the Romulans

After his turn as Mr. Sensitivity in
The Conscience of the King, Spock reverts to type as the coldly
logical Vulcan, cutting the bigotedStiles short during his clumsy
(and roundabout) attempt at an apology for his earlier racism by
pointing out that Spock saving his life was dictated entirely by
Stiles's value to the Enterprise's crew as a highly trained
navigator. Or maybe Spock being short with Stiles had nothing to do
with logic and everything to do with him being peeved by the latter's
bigotry.

I'm glad to say that I was proven
wrong; the dialogue in The Avengers was witty and amusing but it
didn't come off as being forced. The Avengers had just the right mix
of action and humor and every one of the ensemble cast got a chance
to shine, even the two relatively normal members of The Avengers,
Black Widow and Hawkeye. And in a bit of film-making legerdemain,
Joss Whedon managed to use all the resources at his disposal, namely
the above mentioned action and humor blended with some good pacing,
to distract the audience (or at least this viewer) from the film's
143 minute length and a major plot-hole. At the movie's end, I
walked out of the theater surprised at how long it had been and I
wasn't even aware of the plot-hole until someone else pointed it out
to me.

Hawkeye and Black
Widow, normal people with freakish skill sets

The plot-hole in question is the
unexplained transition of the Hulk from out-of-control rage monster
to in-control rage monster. This is a pretty big plot-hole since
out-of-control Hulk ends up being as much a danger to the other
Avengers as the film's villain, Loki, and wreaks considerable havoc
on board S.H.I.E.L.D.'s flying aircraft carrier halfway through the film
while in-control Hulk plays an important role in foiling Loki's
attempt at conquering the world. One gets the feeling that a pivotal
scene ended up on the cutting room floor, perhaps to prevent the film
from being overlong.

Out-of-control Hulk
smashes expensive government property

In-control Hulk smashes
extraterrestrial invader

The absence of any explanation of this
change in the Hulk's character is all the more suprising considering
an embarrassingly clumsy and completely unnecessary bit of exposition
which occurs early in the film when Loki appears at a S.H.I.E.L.D.
facility. Dr. Selvig, the mentor of Thor's love interest in the filmbearing his name, upon seeing Loki, blurts out, "Loki –
brother of Thor!", presumably for the benefit of anyone who
hasn't seen Kenneth Branagh's contribution to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What's particularly puzzling is that throughout the film,
Thor, through his words and actions, repeatedly explains his
relationship to Loki, rendering this clunky bit of dialogue moot.
It's so bad that I suspect it may have been thrown in there as some
kind of joke, especially considering that Joss Whedon is very adept
at exposition, the one exception that comes to mind being the first
few minutes of Firefly's The Train Job.

Loki, brother of Thor

Plotholes and clumsy exposition aside,
my only real quibble about The Avengers is the question it raises of
what will the Avengers do next? The villain for the next film to
feature this superpowered team was revealed after the credits, so we
know who the Avengers will be battling next. However, what villainy
will the individual heroes attempt to foil in their own films? After
all, Iron Man 3 is currently in production and sequels to Captain America and Thor are reported to be in the works. After having
stopped an attempted invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, battling
more "mundane" threats such as Russian arms dealers or
other miscreants seeking monetary gain would seem a bit beneath them.

Black Widow, moments
away from taking down some Russian arms dealers – it's difficult to
imagine her going back to her day job after having helped thwart an
extraterrestrial invasion

Saturday, July 21, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 12, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

Somehow, director Clarence Brown
managed to stuff the essence of Leo Tolstoy's 900 page novel into
this 95 minute movie. What is surprising is that the film doesn't
feel rushed at all except during the transition when the eponymous
heroine of Anna Karenina suddenly reverses herself and declares her
love for Count Vronsky. Had a few more scenes (and minutes) been
spent on this transition, the film would have been perfect.

Besides Anna's rather jarring admission
to Vronsky, the only other complaint I have about the film is its
rather sentimental ending, with the camera lingering on a photograph
of the MILFalicious Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina, while Vronsky and
Yashvin discuss Anna's death at the business end of a train and how
it might have been (or might not have been) averted had Vronsky just
been less of a cad.

As I mentioned before, there's a lot in
this film. Not only is the basic structure of the story as told in
the novel sumptuously brought to the screen, but the hypocrisy
inherent in how society judges lapses in morality differently
depending on the sex of the offender is given significant screen
time; Vronsky, whom the film portrays as being the instigator of his
doomed affair with Anna, barely suffers at all as a result of their
adulterous liaison; the affair and its consequences end up being
nothing more than minor speed bumps in the path his life happens to
be taking. Anna, in contrast, has her life irrevocably ruined. I'd
like to say that much has changed since the 1870's, when the novel
was written, but that'd be naive of me.

Particularly bizarre and almost
discomfiting to this viewer were the over-the-top displays of
physical love shared by Anna and her adolescent son, Sergei; at the
film's conclusion, I half expected Sergei to pluck out his eyes after
Anna took her own life. What made these displays even more strange
were that Anna seemed to show more passion in the kisses she lavished
on her son than to the ones she bestowed upon Vronsky.

Ick.

Also worthy of mention is BasilRathbone's rather creepy portrayal of Anna's husband, Alexei Karenin;
barely showing any emotion and husbanding his movements to the
extreme, he reminded this viewer of an ambush predator lying in wait
for its prey. This impression was given even more weight due to
Basil Rathbone's uncanny resemblance to a praying mantis. However,
instead of literally seizing Anna and biting her head off, BasilRathbone's Karenin only bit off her head spiritually.

Friday, July 20, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 8, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

More police procedural than
science fiction, The Conscience of the King also presents another
side to the brash Captain Kirk, a side which was explored (albeit
under extraordinary conditions) in The Enemy Within. Here, we're
presented with Captain Kirk as Hamlet, indecisive and hesitant, when
confronted with the fact that a mass-murderer from his past is not
dead as was thought but alive and on the Enterprise. Maybe the fact
that he has developed feelings for the mass-murderer's pretty, young
daughter, Lenore, has something to do with his reluctance to act on
the evidence that he has gathered? Or maybe the captain realizes
that human memory is fallible and if one is to accuse a man of having
ordered the executions of over 4,000 men, women and children, one had
better be certain that he has the right man.

Eugenics-inspired
mass-murderer? Or itinerant stage actor? Or both? After 20 years,
it's difficult to be certain...

The 33-year old James.
T. Kirk tongue fences with the 19-year old Lenore

The first point is interesting since
the logical Vulcan in Mr. Spock shouldn't even have considered the
possibility of Lt. Riley being upset at his transfer as being
significant; I guess his human half isn't quite as suppressed as Mr.Spock would like to believe. The second point is interesting because
of how it illustrates a point I've brought up before: Science fiction tends to reflect the mores of the era in which it was
written. Now, I wasn't alive back in the 60's but I'm guessing a man
in his 30's pursuing a 19-year old girl as aggressively as Kirk was
pursuing Lenore wasn't considered inappropriate back then; if this
episode were written nowadays, I would speculate that the
screen-writers would opt to age Lenore a few years in order to
minimize the ick factor or have Kirk limit his interactions with her
to the occasional avuncular pat on the head followed by a lollipop or
an ice-cream cone.

Who watches the
watchers? The crew of the USS Enterprise from The Menagerie watches
the crew of the USS Enterprise from The Cage. Meanwhile, the
Talosians (off-screen) are watching everyone. And we, the audience,
are watching them all

Thursday, June 28, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 3, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

The Enterprise's crew encounters the
flagship of the "First Federation" that is crewed by an
alien being, Balok, who falls prey to possibly the worst bluff in the
history of bad bluffs. To escape certain death, Captain Kirk claims
that the Enteprise has incorporated into it something called
Carbomite, which he describes as being both a material and a
device which guarantees mutually assured destruction should anyone
attack them.

Huh?

Just what is this supposed to mean?

And just how did this bluff work on
anyone possessing more than two neurons to rub together?

It's a good thing that Harry Mudd
wasn't along for this voyage of the USS Enterprise, otherwise, he
probably would have introduced the people of the "FirstFederation" to poker and cleaned those suckers out and touched
off an interstellar incident.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

This article was first posted on
September 1, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor
changes.

I have a problem with this episode.
Just what motive did Dr. Adams have for doing what he did? Was it
megalomania? Was he trying to make a better world (or universe, in
this case)? Was it hubris? Was he convinced that he had arrived at
the method of rehabilitating criminal minds? Was he just
bat-shit crazy? We, the viewers, aren't given an inkling of what
motivated him to build the neural neutralizer and begin turning it on
whoever happened to draw his ire.

Dr. Adams, villain
of the week. What's his motivation for the evil acts he perpetrates
in this episode? Did his parents not buy him a puppy to love and to
hold when he was a boy? Is he just bat-shit crazy? Inquiring minds
want to know!

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

This article was first posted on August
30, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor changes.

I have mixed feelings about Alien: TheDirector's Cut. On one hand, the insertion of never before seen
footage provides us with a perspective on the life cycle of the Alien
different from the Alien as social insect analogue used in Aliens.
On the other hand, the insertion of the footage interferes with the
taut pacing of the original, especially when one considers when
in the sequence of events leading up to the film's climax Ripley
discovers the Alien's nest in the Nostromo; the atmosphere is one of
urgency after Ripley finds Parker's and Lambert's mutilated bodies
and subsequently initiates the Nostromo's self-destruct sequence and
it is during her almost frenzied rush to the Nostromo's
lifeboat/shuttle that she discovers the nest and spends valuable
minutes that she can ill afford to lose (given the self-destruct
mechanism's ten minute timer) exploring the nest and euthanizing, for
lack of a better word, Dallas and Brett, who she finds cocooned and
slowly metamorphosing into Alien eggs. Had she found the nest prior
to initiating the Nostromo's self-destruct sequence, the inclusion of
this scene may have worked. In its present place, it detracts from
the urgency of Ripley's plight.

Be that as it may, details of the Alien
life cycle presented in this scene give us a tantalizing glimpse of
what may have been had this footage not been excised in the original
theatrical release. The first sequel, Aliens, would have certainly
been different, since there wouldn't have been an Alien queen to act
as Ripley's foil. Speaking of Aliens, the more I've watched Alien
(either the original theatrical release or the director's cut), the
more dissatisfied I've grown with its sequel. My primary gripe is on
differences in the way the Alien was portrayed in the two films; in
the first film, the Alien is an ambush predator that establishes a
perch from which it slowly and stealthily approaches its victims
before seizing them and dragging them to its lair where they can be
cocooned; in the second film, the ambush predator is no more and we
are treated to the Alien as a target amongst many in a shooting
gallery, which, to be fair, is probably consistent with the vision of
the Alien as social insect presented in the film.

Frankly, I prefer the vision of the
Alien presented in the original film. To quote the android, Ash:
[The Alien is a] perfect organism. Its structural perfection is
matched only by its hostility. [It is] a survivor... unclouded by
conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

I could have forgiven the
inconsistencies in Mal's characterization in the movie as opposed to
the series (after all, a bit of time was supposed to have passed and
people do change) but I really found the resolution of River's story
arc to be really difficult to stomach. I may be in the minority here
but I find the concept of omnipotent and omniscient heroes to be,
well, boring. During the series, while it was obvious that River had
some unique and powerful abilities, the fact that she was off in
la-la land half the time prevented her from being too obtrusive.
Once she was "cured" of her psychological ailments, she
became...boring. And obtrusive. And speaking of how she was
"cured", it was simply too neat and tidy: River sees a
holographic recording of Ms. Exposition describe how an entire
planetful of people just decided to lay down and die, how the Reavers
came to be and after witnessing the bloody climax of the recording
(Ms. Exposition getting raped and eaten alive by a Reaver), River
purges her demons by vomiting against a nearby wall after which she
declares: "I'm alright...I'm alright". Huh? What? This
was most unsatisfying considering everything that she and Simon went
through during the course of Firefly's fourteen episodes.

Yeah, we get it. She's
cured. And a total badass now

Personally, I think the movie would
have been much more satisfying had River died; if she had simply
closed the blast doors, tossed Simon's medical kit through the doors
before they closed and then gotten killed by the Reavers, the movie
would have been much better. We would have been spared the rather
difficult to swallow scenes of her wading through the Reavers and
piling their corpses up like cordwood and River sacrificing herself
to save her brother and the others would have been very poignant, on
par with Spock sacrificing himself to save the Enterprise and her
crew in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Her dying to save her
brother would also have lent thematic symmetry to their story arc.
And more important of all, we would have been spared the exchange
between River and Mal at the film's end where we realize that she can
essentially do everything that everyone on the crew can (and probably
do a better job of it) which leaves us with the question of what
purpose they serve now.

Spock saves the
Enterprise and its crew in a selfless act of heroism

Of course, having River die in Serenity
probably would not have sat well with many
Firefly fans, especially since almost a third of the original cast
ended up getting killed off in the film. River dying probably would
have resulted in grief-stricken Firefly fans converging upon JossWhedon's home with torches and pitchforks in hand and bloody
vengeance in their hearts. However, I find nothing wrong with the
idea of the hero dying in a story. I thought the Star Trek moviefranchise would have been much better had Spock stayed dead in the
aftermath of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (if anything, it could
have opened up some interesting story-lines about how Kirk and the
rest of the crew dealt with their grief and eventually got on with
their lives) and I thought Lethal Weapon 2 would have been a much
better movie had Riggs died in Murtaugh's arms. There's nothing
wrong with the hero dying, either in the act of saving the lives of
others or avenging a loved one.

Frankly, if children were anything like
how they were portrayed in Miri, I'd be scared of children, too. The
children in Miri are not just obnoxiously disobedient, they even have
a penchant for violence and murder.

Apparently, denial isn't just a riverin Egypt. You can't tell me that they learned that bonking someone
on the head with an object with some heft to it (like, say, a hammer)
is an efficacious means of depriving them of life just by reading it
in a book. For one thing, I doubt those little savages could read.
No, rest assured, they learned all that through experience.

300 years of murderous experience.

Bonk bonk on the head!
Bonk bonk! Bonk bonk! The head being bonked is Kirk's

Besides the interesting views on
children that must have been held by this episode's writers, Miri is
notable for being the first of the "another Earth"
episodes. However, this angle isn't used to its full potential and
it really wouldn't make any difference to the story if it were
expunged. Also of interest is the continuing evolution of the
Kirk-Spock-McCoytriumvirate; Spock and McCoy go at it like an old
married couple but I'm not sure if their catty exchanges really count
since McCoy was going mad due to the effects of an alien plague.
Spock continues to display emotion and a dry sense of humor. And
Janice Rand reveals to Kirk that she's been trying to get him to
check out her gams for quite some time. I bet she's embarrassed she
let that slip out. I guess the take-home lesson of all this
is, if you're going to contract a killer virus that makes you go mad
and causes you to reveal your embarrassing secret longings, avoid
hanging around people about whom you have those embarrassing secret
longings.

Yeoman Rand finally
gets Kirk to notice her, although not under the best of circumstances

What are little girls
made of? I'd certainly like to know since I'd like to make me some
of this! I'm referring, of course, to the naughty looking brunette
with the barely there outfit, not the Lurch look-alike with the
shaved head

What's particularly annoying in this
episode are the contradictions inherent in what ultimately causes
Roger Korby, Nurse Chapel's fiance and the episode's villain, to
immolate himself and his delicious little fembot assistant, Andrea,
at phaser-point; Kirk manages to manipulate Andrea and Ruk, Korby's
hulking brute of an android bodyguard, into acting in emotional,
almost human, ways and he even points this out to Korby to refute the
latter's claim that an android society would be free of human foibles
and the mayhem that often accompanies them. However, Korby's stated
reason for killing himself and Andrea is that neither of them is
human, Andrea because she is simply an android (albeit an incredibly sexy one) and himself because the human Korby died a long
time ago, leaving behind a robotic copy that ostensibly carries his
soul. Given that what triggers Korby's act of murder-suicide is
Andrea throwing herself at him offering him her love (a decidedly
human act), it's difficult to understand his reasoning.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

This article was first posted on August
17, 2010. It is presented in its entirety with some minor changes.

Like The Enemy Within, Mudd's Women
reflects the mores of the era in which it was written. In this case,
the mores in question deal with the characteristics of the ideal
wife; apparently, back in the 1960's, the ideal wife was someone who
looked as if they could have been cast from the same mold as Marilyn Monroe or
Mamie Van Doren with the ability to cook and sew being desirable perks.

I'm not making this up!

Besides the rather quaint image of the
perfect wife presented by this episode, it seems that not only have
values come full circle (or come many circles) from the 1960's to the
23rd century, but the business of providing of mail order brides to
wealthy and desperately lonely men seems to be alive and well in the
world of Star Trek. Women are bought and sold or, in this case,
traded for dilithium crystals, and no one seems to bat an eye. Kirk
seems more upset that the owners of the dilithium crystals are
striking a hard bargain rather than the fact that what they're
bargaining for is the right to marry the eponymous Mudd's women.

As with many of the earlier episodes,
Spock, displays a scandalous (for a Vulcan) amount of emotion,
smirking mischievously as he observes the effect that Mudd's women
have on the Enterprise's crew; because of the Venus Drug that the
women have ingested, every male member of the Enterprise crew ends up
being so hypnotized by their ass-ets that they practically need to be
hosed down with cold water to break the spell the women have on them.